Twenty years -- half of the length of time that Moses led the wandering Jews through the desert -- will be enough for Boston’s own leader. Though his tenure strikes most Bostonians as somewhat biblical in its own right.

“We have a friend who calls him, ‘Pharaoh,” a friendly fortyish resident of Boston’s Dorchester neighborhood told me on the day that Tom Menino announced he would not seek a sixth term.

“Pharaoh?” I wondered. “Mumbles,” and “Mayor Pothole” were Menino nicknames I’d heard before. “Pharaoh” was a new one.

“Yes, because he’s been here forever!”

That’s true. When Thomas M. Menino became Boston’s mayor in 1993, Bill Clinton was only into the second year of his presidency. The Red Sox were still 11 years away from breaking the curse and winning a World Series again. Justin Bieber hadn’t been born yet.

Longevity alone doesn’t make a leader great. Take the late U.S. Sen. Strom Thurmond (R-SC). Actually, when the good Lord did take him at age 100, there are those who might have speculated that Thurmond’s long career had included sitting in on the signing of the Declaration of Independence. (It didn’t. I don’t think.) But it did span 50 years in Washington, and it did include being a very public face for racism and intolerance. (Privately, Thurmond fathered a child with an African-American woman.) Like I said, longevity ain’t everything.

By contrast, has Menino’s tenure been perfect? Hardly. His preferred pace for change bordered somewhere between deliberate and glacial. Today, there is significant and vital development progressing on the city’s waterfront. But it’s literally 20 years in the making. Some still cannot fathom how Menino had allowed the boom years of the late '90s turn to bust without having made today’s waterfront progress happen then.

Menino had some personal traits that weren’t helpful when it comes to development, either. (Just ask Boston developer Don Chiofaro.) The mayor could be famously thin-skinned; if you crossed or displeased him, your project had a better chance in Boise than Boston.

On the other hand, Menino had some very good personal traits, too. Like honesty and integrity. Twenty years is an awful long time in a big city to go without a whiff of scandal or corruption. By contrast, former Boston Mayor James Michael Curley hardly went a day in that regard. (And frequently it was on the degree of “stench,” not “whiff.”)

Personally, I will always remember Menino in terms of his just-plain-folks demeanor and his genuine friendliness. It wasn’t an act. (Who would affect his marbles-in-mouth speaking style?) As a politician, he had a gift. But it always seemed genuine.

I recall interviewing him on a bitterly cold and snowy winter day in the city’s rough Roxbury section. We stood inside the shell of a three-decker about to be rehabbed as part of an effort to turn around the tide of violence and despair that had engulfed the neighborhood. When we finished, a woman with a young daughter approached him; she said something quietly and began sobbing. The mayor hugged her, took her daughter by the hand, and led the two of them outside where he continued to speak intently with her for a time. The man cared.

I recall also a hot, humid, August day out on Boston Harbor, where the mayor was visiting one of his prized projects, Camp Harborview, a real summer refuge for inner city kids. After our interview, we chatted a bit; as he looked around at the kids playing, he became a bit emotional.

“You know what this means to a kid from Dorchester or Roxbury or Hyde Park?,” he said quietly, shaking his head. “Look at these kids … ”

An aide tried to gently begin ushering the mayor to the car. It was too late. A youngster tossed him a volley ball and begged him to join their game on the sandy court. The mayor happily complied. Twenty minutes later, he was filing through the lunch line with them. The aide was helpless.

“What do I think Bostonians will miss most about Mayor Menino?” a 30ish young professional man in the city’s Jamaica Plain neighborhood reflected on my question.

“That he liked to get into the trenches; that he really tried to do stuff to help people in the community.”

Say what you will, you don’t end up personally meeting over half of your city’s residents without getting into the trenches.

On a raw, gray late-March day, an hour or so before Menino officially made his retirement announcement at a packed Faneuil Hall, I asked another of his constituents what he would miss about the mayor.

“That’s a tough one, that’s a tough one,” said the tall African-American man quietly. He took a long look down Centre Street, and paused for a moment before continuing.

“For someone to come along like Mayor Menino, I don’t know … he’s one of the rare few, the rare few. Yeah, he’ll be missed.”

A day after Trevor Noah was declared the new host of "The Daily Show," complete with the blessing of the exiting Jon Stewart, graphic tweets targeting women, Jews and victims of the Ebola virus are causing a social media backlash.